Anyone for gulli-danda?

Letters

Vol. 21 No. 15 · 29 July 1999

From Richard Taylor

Gulli-danda, as described by Tariq Ali (LRB, 15 July), is the same game as tip-cat, which my grandfather introduced to me as having been a boyhood game in Gloucestershire in the 1870s. (The OED gives a date of 1801; the game is no doubt much older.) V.S. Naipaul's father, Seepersad, writes in his stories of stick-fighting contests in Trinidad between rival villages. This sport also figures in Thomas Hughes's The Scouring of the White Horse, set in Uffington in Berkshire. In both cases the fighting is described with some misgiving as to whether it is a desirable sport. Does the presence of identical pastimes in England and the former colonies mean that the games were carried out to these places by Britons, or is it that similar simple sports will arise anywhere?

Richard Taylor
Craven Arms, Shropshire

Vol. 21 No. 16 · 19 August 1999

From George Chowdharay-Best

Richard Taylor (Letters, 29 July) does not even consider the possibility that, far from having been carried to India from England, tip-cat might have come to Gloucestershire from India. Polo, of course, is the most clear-cut case of such a phenomenon; and I have seen it stated that in Canada the natives played a game not dissimilar to lacrosse, which European invaders took up. They changed the name, changed the rules and began teaching it back to the natives. This has not exactly happened with chess, another game said to have been invented in India; but it could be argued that Indian numerals, of which the Arabic are merely a modification, have been used in the same way as lacrosse, rewritten and taught back so that the originals have been superseded. One must, however, draw the line somewhere; and I would not go so far as to claim that snooker, proficiency at which is the proverbial sign of a misspent youth, was also an Indian invention. Now I come to think of it, though, it was invented in India, but by an Englishman, at Jubbulpore. If the Indians did not invent the game, they at least provided Sir Neville Chamberlain, an officer in the Devonshire Regiment in the 1870s, with the leisure to do so.

George Chowdharay-Best
London SW3

Vol. 21 No. 17 · 2 September 1999

From Roger Hutchinson

It is likely that parallel evolution can best account for the origins of tip-cat and gulli-danda (Letters, 19 August). Almost identical versions of these games were to be found until quite recently in the North of England, where it was called 'knurr and spell', and in the Hebrides, where it was known as 'speilean', 'iomart air speil' or 'cat and bat'. It is possible that these games spread around Britain (their names indicate as much), less likely that they travelled between here and the Indian subcontinent.

George Chowdharay-Best is correct to say that lacrosse was stolen from native Americans. They called it 'baggataway', until the 18th-century French pioneer Charlevoix noticed a contest in Algonquin country and renamed the game after the bishop's crozier which the sport's curved stick brought to his mind. However, the game was definitively legislated by the English Lacrosse Association in London in 1868 ('these rules are greatly superior to the Canadian, and … they are the best which English experience has yet been able to devise').

And Subaltern Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues did indeed while away the monsoon afternoons at Jubbulpore in 1875 playing a game which they christened 'snooker', after the slang term for a first-year army cadet (from the French for 'novice'). Chamberlain later left the Devonshires, however, and following injury he took the game to the hill-station of Ootacamund, where snooker was further refined. The snooker room at the Ootacamund Club still advertises itself as the birthplace of the game.

Roger Hutchinson
Isle of Skye

Vol. 21 No. 21 · 28 October 1999

From Pasquale Montagna

I was born and grew up in a remote corner of South-East Italy, a few kilometres from Otranto. The region is traditionally linked to Greece and the Balkans (there are still Greek-speaking communities in the province), but I didn't think of India as part of its cultural heritage. One of my fondest memories, however, is of playing 'gulli-danda' in the streets as a ten-year-old in the early Sixties. The game was called mazza e pizzarieddhu in our local dialect, though it's called lippa in Italian (nizza is preferred in Rome; pandolo in Venice).

Pasquale Montagna
Bologna